Karaoke & Cold Lazarus: introduced by the author

Description

Karaoke is set in the present day. Daniel Feeld, a successful screenwriter, is in physical crisis: he is dying. His latest screenplay is being butchered by a patrician director who favours his mistress-star in every scene. But, worse than this, Feeld more than half-imagines that he hears people everywhere speaking his dialogue. Fact and fiction collide. Daniel starts drinking heavily and his real life begins to mirror that of his own screenplay character.Cold Lazarus is set 400 years in the future. Feeld's cryogenically preserved head is being commercially exploited. An American media tycoon realizes the astronomical ratings potential of a TV show in which the 'real' twentieth-century story of Daniel Feeld's life, via his chemically induced memories, can be fed to millions of viewers. Whilst Daniel's 'memories' ebb and flow and the moguls fight over him, a dissident organization of Luddites, RON (Reality or Nothing), seeks to return to what it believes to have been a gentler age - the twentieth century.

Dennis Potter was born in 1935 in Gloucestershire. After National Service he won a place at New College, Oxford where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He became one of Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed dramatists. His plays for television include Blue Remembered Hills (1979), Brimstone and Treacle (commissioned in 1975 but banned until 1987), the series Pennies from Heaven (1978), The Singing Detective (1986), Blackeyes (1989) and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993). He also wrote novels, stage plays and screenplays. Seeing the Blossom, his final television interview, was published in 1994. He died in June 1994.